Vote for Swiss-inspired panels at #SXSW2017

Each year in spring, the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) brings together creative minds in film, interactive media and music for a ten-day session of conferences and events in Austin, Texas. The selection of panels is highly competitive – and there are currently five panels with Swiss participation in the running for SXSW 2017.

Part of the decision will be made through a public voting system, by so-called “panel pickers!” Anyone can be a panel picker, and as such you can cast your vote for the panels you find most interesting. swissnex San Francisco is supporting the following roundtables:

Can I Trust My AI Therapist? – Artificial intelligence could help solve some of the world’s biggest health challenges, from early diagnosis to mental illness to predicting epidemics. Yet, how can we make sure medical AI systems respect our privacy and do no harm? This panel, organized by swissnex San Francisco’s Benjamin Bollmann, brings together experts in AI, ethics, and health from Silicon Valley, Switzerland, and the UK to explore urgent questions surrounding the ethical use of AI in healthcare and public health.

Elastic Interfaces For Your Body – Think for a moment about the future of digital interfaces. What if you could wear electronic clothes and your skin could be interactive? What if a biointerface could directly link your cortical activity to the cloud? Our panel brings together experts in neural implants, soft electronics, and fashion design from Switzerland and Canada to explore how the human body and technology may be seamlessly integrated in the future, all the way from the inside to outside of the body. Discussions will range from the decoding of brain activity to augment human capacities, to artificial skin, to the role of design in developing new wearable technologies.

How to Incubate Creativity? – Interesting new ideas emerge from interdisciplinary approaches, when designers, artists, technologists and researchers come together.

Today’s start-up ecosystem is tailored to tech entrepreneurs seeking rapid monetisation.This is not the inspiring environment designers and artists need, but their perspective is needed more than ever. The coolest new technology is nothing without interesting content or a creative mind imagining the possibilities of a new medium.

Citizen Science for Serious Gamers – In 2016, Massively Multiplayer Online Science became one of the biggest citizen science efforts with the success of Project Discovery – a human protein classification game performed by the players of the massively multiplayer sci-fi game: EVE Online. In two months 100’000 gamers have submitted 13’000’000 protein classifications while gaming – an unprecedented success in citizen science and in scientific outreach. The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Wired, Nature Methods and many other journals wrote about this achievement.
Let us share with you background stories, super interesting data and our vision of the future of citizen science in video games.

From Video Games to Higher Education – In 2016, Massively Multiplayer Online Science became one of the biggest citizen science efforts with 13’000’000 protein classifications submitted by 100’000 gamers of EVE Online. The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Wired, Nature Methods and many other journals wrote about this achievement.
After games, the next step is to bring citizen science to students of MOOCs. Let us share the lessons learnt from the first implementation with the University of Geneva.

The public can vote on projects until September 2, 2016 and their vote counts for 30% of the overall vote.